Ten Reasons towards Cryptography
Author: IT-Observer Staff
Monday, 25 July 2005, 20:26 GMT
Cryptography is already the de facto way of securing sensitive web traffic and it is now reaching across the entire enterprise as companies start to use industry-standard protocols such as SSL internally - even between servers only a few feet apart.
Below are nCipher’s top-ten reasons towards cryptography:
1. Inexpensive tokens for strong authentication - Using anything stronger than passwords for authentication has been prohibitively expensive for anything other than premium users; but market volumes and competitive pressures are now commoditizing authentication tokens and driving functionality up and prices down.
2. Ease of deployment for tokens - The arrival of USB tokens and the inclusion of card readers in laptops and keyboards is minimizing and sometimes removing deployment costs.
3. Trusted computing and trustworthy devices - Embedded security such as Trusted Platform Modules (TPM) provide a 'seat of trust' to authenticate devices as well as users.
4. Security standards with teeth - The Trusted Computing Group (TCG) is revolutionizing PC platform security while the Payments Card Industry (PCI) standards define an approach to data privacy and then back it up with audits.
5. Public key enabled applications are already here - While the 'year of PKI' never came, functionality based on public key cryptographic and digital certificates are now part of the IT fabric, supporting secure websites, email messaging, mutual authentication and document level protection.
6. Identity management isn't just about users - As well as just reducing the cost of forgotten passwords, identity management systems are now focused on provisioning devices as well as users across the enterprise, leading to easier roaming and fine-grained access controls.
7. Plug and play data level protection - Off-the-shelf solutions now exist to transparently encrypt valuable content within the database, filing system and storage fabric.
8. SSL everywhere - No longer limited to e-commerce connections, SSL is a ubiquitous feature of enterprise applications and networking, enabling almost any connection to be protected and removing the need to run expensive private networks.
9. No more cryptographic bottlenecks - Moore's Law means that high performance cryptographic accelerators can now meet the needs of the most demanding applications.
10. Cryptographic management for scalability - Advanced, automated solutions are being developed to manage ubiquitous cryptography and the growth in the number of keys, using specialist techniques to prevent security being compromised in the name of scalability.
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